This post is to bring you up to date on the the battle over the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) giving over $1 million dollars to a theological organization to study the implications of extraterrestrial life for theology. The Freedom from Religion Foundation is trying to get NASA to rescind the grant on First Amendment grounds, but NASA is fighting back, avoiding disclosing what the grant actually said. I’ve posted three times about this.

First, NASA gave a $1.1 million dollar grant to the Center for Theological Inquiry, an organization at Princeton that emphasizes Christian theology. The CTI’s director crowed about it, but revealed a seemingly illegal entanglement of religion with government (NASA is a government organization):

I brought this to the FFRF’s attention, and they wrote to NASA, also filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for all materials related to the grant. (See the FFRF’s letter at the link.)

Then NASA largely stonewalled, refusing to provide much information unless the FFRF specified authors, dates, and so on—things that the FFRF couldn’t possibly know. It was at this point that I began to suspect that NASA had something to hide.

Now I suspect that even more. Here are the latest developments:

• NASA did cough up some information: the notice of the grant award and the contract between NASA and the CTI about the grant. The grant itself was not provided, nor were any emails about it. They also provided an uninformative evaluation of the grant, only two pages long and given it an “E” for excellent.

• NASA also provided a five-page discussion of how the proposal was evaluated, emphasizing its social aspects and downplaying its religious aspects. (All these documents are publicly available and I can send them, but please don’t ask unless you intend to do something with them.)

• NASA provided CTI’s ongoing “progress report” of the grant’s accomplishments, which, to me at least, are not impressive. (How could they be? It’s theology, Jake!) The “fellows” arrived at CTI and had some seminars, and now are supposed to disseminate their results. Here’s an excerpt of what has been done so far (my emphasis)

Many of the fellows are planning to incorporate their immersion in astrobiology into their teaching at their home institutions. For example, Ulrike Auga will run a seminar on astrobiology and visual culture at the Humboldt University, Berlin, summer 2016. Others have proposed panels on astrobiology and society at various scholarly conferences.

I’ve never seen any paper that didn’t acknowledge the organization that provided financial support.

Finally, NASA simply refused to provide two important things: the internal and external email communications about the grant, and, most important, the CTI grant proposal (my emphasis). Here’s NASA’s reason for refusal:

Their excuse is that the CTI is in effect a “contractor”, and contractor proposals can by law be kept secret. For proposals to the Departments of Defense, and the four armed forces, that makes some sense as a matter of national security, and these departments are specified. So is NASA, and in some cases that’s justifiable too. But, as Andrew Seidel, the FFRF lawyer handling this case, wrote me, “The problem is that the government was trying to protect defense contractors from certain FOIA provisions, which makes a certain amount of sense given what they do, but lumped NASA in because of some of its sensitive work. CTI’s proposal clearly doesn’t fall within the ambit of that original purpose, it could not be less sensitive either technologically or militarily, but it got swept in anyway.”

Now NASA is arguing that the phrase “may not” means it lacks discretion in releasing the CTI proposal; that it’s prohibited by law from doing so.  The FFRF disagrees, and has appealed NASA’s refusal to release the grant in a letter to NASA that’s highlighted in this press release (the letter is too long to put here).

This is a big chunk of change, and I don’t want money earmarked for space research to be involved in furthering theology. Have a look at Lucas Mix’s paper if you want to see the enormous and ludicrous waste of time and effort involved in pondering the effects of astrobiology on Jesus. What can we do?

It’s not clear if NASA will release the theology grant, as they have some legal standing to withhold it.

But even if NASA won’t release that grant proposal, there’s no reason why the Center for Theological Inquiry can’t. In fact, if they want to be transparent about things, and think they’re doing a public service, they SHOULD release it. I for one will be writing the CTI asking them to release the grant, and perhaps some public pressure will help with this.  If you want the Center for Theological Inquiry to make its grant from NASA public, you can write to Dr. William Storrar, head of the Center for Theological Inquiry. You can send it to him via the address cti@ctinquiry.org